Picnik Vs. Flickr: A Growth Comparison

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Just a quick observation here. Seattle-based Picnik, the popular photo-editing startup, said yesterday it has reached the “1 billion photos edited” mark. Is this a big deal?

Well, if you compare the growth of Picnik to that of arguably the world’s top social storage site for photos, Flickr, it could be a very revealing milestone. For reference, here’s Flickr’s growth chart, in terms of the number of photos uploaded. The site has had three distinct phases of growth: an exponential rise until June 2007 (when it absorbed Yahoo! Photos), followed by two super-fast linear growth stages bringing it to 3 billion photos about a year ago.

In comparison, Picnik’s chart (see below) shows faster growth than Flickr’s, starting from its launch in 2007—if you compare the exponential portions of the curves. Flickr reached 500 million uploads in its first 3.5 years, whereas Picnik has reached 1 billion uploads in three years since January 2007 (these uploads include photos opened from social sites like Flickr and Facebook). It’s the kind of classic hockey-stick growth you’d show to investors—except, oops, Picnik doesn’t have outside investors, it was all self-funded.

Picnik is celebrating by opening its premium service to all users for free for 24 hours starting at 9 am Pacific Time today.

Here’s Picnik’s growth curve:

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Gregory T. Huang is Xconomy's Deputy Editor, National IT Editor, and Editor of Xconomy Boston. E-mail him at gthuang [at] xconomy.com. Follow @gthuang